Find Time For Stillness

Being in internal and external stillness is my happy place.

It is where I can stop thinking, stop worrying, stop wondering,

stop existing anywhere but here and now.

And yet I often catch myself reaching out for something to fill that space.

It may be a worry. A conversation. A task.

It can be a memory. An analysis. A building of a plan.

And even when I find myself unexpectedly in stillness, I seem to feel a need to remove myself from it. As if I don’t deserve it; or perhaps that I have forgotten how much I love it. I can feel compelled to be productive as much as possible to the point where the mere thought of being “productive” is exhausting.

It wasn’t always this way.

When I was younger I prided myself on being able to sit and just be for long stretches of time. I wouldn’t get caught up in my thinking or try to “capture” the moment for Instagram (ahem… I was young well before Instagram). Nope. I would just sit and enjoy the silence – internal and external – and just be.

I never felt guilty for taking that time. I never felt as if I was slacking off or being lazy. I always felt that it was important to stop and take a moment (or ten) to just be.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped finding the time to sit. I came to value busyness and placed greater importance on full schedules and bountiful commitments to others, then to sitting on a porch sipping tea in silence. I felt that the more I could engage, the more I was using my time wisely. And for a while, this system worked. I was active from sun up to past sun down and I felt I was doing meaningful work and play.

And it wasn’t until my personal life felt like it was unraveling that I wondered, “perhaps being busy isn’t what makes up a meaningful life.”

It has taken me years to unravel my beliefs around busyness and constant engagement, and it will continue to take years beyond today.

I had to hit pause on everything and ask myself some hard questions.

Why was I doing all the things I was doing? What was really important to me? How was I impacting the well being of those around me? How was I impacting the well being of myself?

These can be a scary question to ask – especially when we have been on auto pilot for a long time. But in the years that I delved into these questions, I found myself returning to the porch with a cup of tea. And in that stillness I went from extreme discomfort and mental anguish to a release of those thought patterns that told me “more is always better.”

We need stillness in our lives in order to build depth into our experiences on Earth. Living an inch deep and hundred miles long leaves all of us feeling strung out and exhausted. It’s not about having the most experiences, or engaging our senses all the time. It truly is about those moments sitting on the porch and existing beyond past and present; outside of external input or feedback; and relishing that silence.

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